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Countess Bathory

Elizabeth Báthory (wikipedia)
Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed (7 August 1560 – 21 August 1614) was a countess from the renowned Báthory family of nobility in the Kingdom of Hungary. She has been labelled the most prolific female serial killer in history and is remembered as the “Blood Countess,” though the precise number of victims is debated. Since her story comes only from those who accused her and was only written down more than 100 years after her death, it quickly rose to folkloric and horrific proportions.
After her husband Ferenc Nádasdy’s death, she and four collaborators were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of girls, with one witness attributing to them over 650 victims, though the number for which they were convicted was 80. It is interesting to note that the purported witnesses testified to only 30-35 deaths. Supposedly due to her rank, Elizabeth herself was neither tried nor convicted, but promptly imprisoned upon her arrest in December 1610 within Csejte Castle, Upper Hungary, now in Slovakia, where she remained immured in a set of rooms until her death four years later.
Later writings about the case have led to legendary accounts of the Countess bathing in the blood of virgins to retain her youth and subsequently also to comparisons with Vlad III the Impaler of Wallachia, on whom the fictional Count Dracula is partly based, and to modern nicknames of the Blood Countess and Countess Dracula.
In recent years, given such evidence as a better understanding of human blood’s relatively quick rate of coagulation (which would make it rather hard to bathe in), the lack of a fair trial, and the first written accounts being 119 years after her death, some historians have begun to reconsider the Countess’ infamy. While most sources continue to cling to the lurid “Countess Dracula” or “Blood Countess” image, some are reconsidering their interpretation. Considering such facts as the Countess being an unfavorable Protestant, a very rare woman managing a very valuable estate on her own, and that the local king owed her late husband a large sum of money which he was unable to repay, it is worth giving a second thought to her whirlwind arrest and almost immediate imprisonment.